Small-data transmission is becoming an issue for wireless communication especially for 4G (e.g., LTE) radios due to the burden of control signaling overhead. Compared to 3G, 4G provides an always connected data mode where the user equipment (UE) has the IP address. Whenever a UE connects to an LTE network, a default (e.g., best effort) flow is assigned to the UE along with an IP address. Besides the connection between UE and an enhanced Node B (eNB), this IP connection requires bearer establishment between the eNB and the core network. Thus, setting up a connection requires a great deal of signaling overhead. This overhead is negligible when the amount of data exchanged such as in applications such as web browsing or file transfer is very large. But a lot of other applications, such as social networking apps like Facebook, Twitter and machine-type communication (MTC) applications (e.g., smart parking meters), the amount of data transferred may be very small (e.g., hundreds of bites) compared to the signaling overhead involved in setting up and tearing down the LTE connection.
Thus there are general needs for reducing the signaling overhead for frequent small-data transmissions.